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Re: [RFC] win-iconv
On Thu, 2012-11-22 at 16:37 +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Nov 21 20:06, Yaakov (Cygwin/X) wrote:
> > Fedora's MinGW toolchain has used win-iconv[1] instead of GNU libiconv
> > since F16. win-iconv uses the Win32 APIs to do the heavy lifting,
> > making it almost 50 times smaller than GNU libiconv. It handles most of
> > the same codesets as libiconv and even some the latter does not
> > (including the glibc aliases UTF8/UTF16 for UTF-8/UTF-16 etc.). I have
> > attached a normalized diff between `iconv -l` from libiconv and current
> > win-iconv. OTOH, it doesn't provide all of the API extensions of GNU
> > libiconv, but neither does glibc.
>
> The downside is that it doesn't support some of the codesets supported
> by Cygwin, for instance big5, euccn, eucjp, euckr, georgian-ps, tis-620.
Big-5 and EUC-* are supported, those first four are just missing
aliases. The last two are indeed missing.
> > We could even go one step further and incorporate win-iconv (which is
> > Public Domain) directly into Cygwin itself, which would provide greater
> > compatibility with glibc and save patches to several packages which
> > don't use portable ways (e.g. AM_ICONV) for searching for iconv(3), or
> > use $(LIBICONV) when they should use $(LTLIBICONV), etc. This would add
> > about 18KB to cygwin1.dll but save almost 1MB of memory and ImageBase
> > space for hundreds of packages.
>
> Sounds like a worthy goal to me. But it really should at least support
> the codesets also supported by Cygwin.
OK, I'll have to look into this further.
Yaakov